INTRODUCTION
Climate change, rampant late-stage capitalism and wealth inequality, political polarization, corporate corruption, impending resource depletion—these are the forces shaping our world today. They’re also the issues driving a new breed of literary sci-fi, fantasy and speculative fiction—genres typically considered literature’s ghetto, but which lately have begun to tackle the problems facing our world with a clarity found nowhere else, not even journalism.

THE PARTICIPANTS: Elizabeth Bear, Bradley P. Beaulieu, Charles Stross, and Rob Ziegler.

MODERATOR: Jeremy Lassen of Night Shade Books.

Jeremy Lassen: The scope of this discussion is pretty broad, so I want to start out by asking a question that hopefully will frame it nicely, and then we can move to more specifics from there.

Question 1: What in your opinions are the benefits and/or drawbacks of using fiction, and specifically Science fiction to talk about pressing contemporary political/social/environmental concerns? To seed the discussion with an example from yesteryear, I’ll point to a hoary old cliché from Science fiction: Star Trek had an Alien on the bridge of the enterprise, and he was a stand-in for “Racial Other.” In what ways was this more effective, or less effective than having an actual person of color as second in command on the bridge, in terms of advancing the cause of the civil rights?
Charles Stross

I have no idea about the American political issue in question, much less the cultural significance of a network-TV show in the 1960s, so I’m going to ignore that aspect and instead tackle the first part of the question.

To which my reply is, it depends what the author is trying to do — and who they are.
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